Information-centric networking, also known as content centric networking (CCN) or named-data networking (NDN), is currently well suited to enable customers and service providers to discover and exchange information, such as information in an ad hoc device-to-device (D2D) scenario. ICN allows a user to focus on the data needed, rather than having to reference a specific, physical location where that data is to be retrieved from. ICN provides a wide range of benefits such as content caching to reduce congestion and improve delivery speed, simpler configuration of network devices, and building security into the network at the data level.
Current ICN forwarding solutions are not optimized to efficiently handle flow-based traffic. The overhead introduced during each forwarding lookup (through the use of longest prefix matching) is a major limiting factor in achieving the targeted transmission rates. Current approaches typically aim to reduce the processing cycles required for each lookup, independent of the other lookups. However, since each request (or Interest) is treated as a separate entity, results from the previous similar lookups (for instance, for packets carrying the same forwardable portion of the content name) are not utilized. To support the desired 100+Gbps rates for an ICN content router, an efficient technique is needed to proactively take advantage of the results from the previous lookups.